This invention relates broadly to the art of household animal cages and more specifically to easily cleanable bird cages.
The cleaning of household animal cages, and especially bird cages, has long presented a difficult problem to animal lovers. Owning caged household animals often involves a compromise between not performing an inordinate amount of cleaning and having a barely acceptable dirty cage. It is an object of this invention to provide an animal cage assembly which can be kept clean with a very small amount of work so that an owner of a caged household animal can maintain a clean cage without expending an undue amount of work.
A number of easy-to-clean animal cage assemblies have been suggested which include rolls of paper adjacent to floors of cages from which paper can be pulled across the floors to periodically clean the floors. Patents which have suggested this include U.S. Pat. No. 2,983,251 to Lingis and U.S. Pat. No. 2,189,449 to Morris. A major difficulty in the use of these cage assemblies is that feed and other dry materials easily work their way under the paper and are not taken out of the cages by pulling the paper across the floors. Thus, it is an object of this invention to provide an easily cleanable animal cage which automatically cleans dried feed and other dried material from the cage.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,572,107 to Clarizo discloses a bird cage having a slatted floor with four sloping walls thereunder to form a funnel for guiding dried materials into a sack located thereunder. The four sloping walls can have newspaper mounted thereon to prevent sticky material, such as bird excrement, from sticking thereto. Although this bird cage assembly provides some improvements over other prior-art cage assemblies, it has several major disadvantages. One of the disadvantages is that paper pieces must be especially cut to fit the non-rectangular walls thereof, which is time-consuming. Further, where the four pieces of paper come together there are still slits located directly below a bird cage floor through which bird excrement can fall. Thus, the walls can still get dirty. Still further, the pieces of paper are held in place at their upper ends, however, the lower ends thereof are free to flap and could thereby be pulled away from their respective walls leaving additional gaps between the sheets through which excrement might fall. Thus, it is an object of this invention to provide an animal cage assembly which can be easily cleaned, which does not involve pieces of paper cut to special shapes, and which does not involve so many pieces of paper. Further, it is an object of this invention to provide such an animal cage in which paper sheets covering baffles do not have gaps between the sheets which can expose the baffles.